How Do Community Smells Influence Code Smells?

Code smells reflect sub-optimal patterns of code that often lead to critical software flaws or failure. In the same way, community smells reflect sub-optimal organisational and socio-technical patterns in the organisational structure of the software community. To understand the relation between the community smells and code smells we start by surveying 162 developers of nine open-source systems. Then we look deeper into this connection by conducting an empirical study of 117 releases from these systems. Our results indicate that community-related factors are intuitively perceived by most developers as causes of the persistence of code smells. Inspired by this observation we design a community-aware prediction model for code smells and show that it outperforms a model that does not consider community factors.